A Cambridge robotics consultancy has been working with another city tech firm on the world’s first sleep-sensing headphones.

Robotae has designed the electronics architecture for Kokoon. As reported in the News, the Bluetooth headphones use an electroencephalography (EEG) sensor to monitor electrical signals from brain neurons, lowering the volume of music as the wearer drifts off to sleep. They have proved popular on Kickstarter, where the company has raised $2m and pre-sold 10,000 units.

Dr Kevin Rathbone of Robotae

Dr Kevin Rathbone, founder and CEO of Robotae, said his company develops systems that respond intelligently to changes in their environment, and has helped accelerate Kokoon’s development.

“Processors, sensors and actuators are becoming faster, smaller, and cheaper,” he said.

“They are also more power-efficient and this is making it more feasible to incorporate mechatronics into a wider range of portable consumer products. This has coincided with advances in artificial intelligence and the development of new robotic safety standards.

“Kokoon needed development to start immediately, while they grew the team. It’s a great concept with enormous potential, so I was keen to get involved.

“By the time they had recruited a permanent electronics engineer, I had developed their proof of concept into an architecture suitable for product development, significantly extended the battery life, and designed a development PCB to allow the team to experiment with various hardware options and begin embedded software development.”

Kokoon’s CEO Tim Antos first had the idea for the sleep-sensing headphones when he secured a high-level job and decided to improve his sleep patterns to cope with the increased stress. He discovered audio relaxation to be an effective solution, but found his regular headphones uncomfortable to wear when sleeping.

The company’s co-founder and CTO Richard Hall believes the headphones, together with the accompanying mobile app, audio library, sleeping techniques and progress tracker opens up potential in the future for marketing as a medical device.

“Kokoon uses EEG sensing as used for medical science for brain activity research and sleep studies,” he said. ”Most wearable devices use actigraphy (monitoring of human rest/motor activity cycles) which gives loose approximations of sleep states and has limited value in the area we need.”

Robotae focuses on consumer electronics, and elsewhere has been working on a number of innovative projects, including development of a gonioreflectometer (no, me neither) for Change of Paradigm, an ecommerce fashion platform that enables photorealistic rendering of high-end fashion. They have also developed a sophisticated “gimbal” for the retailer, a device which apparently allows cameras mounted on drones to remain steady under all conditions.

Rathbone believes the future is bright, with technologies maturing and the robotics market continuing to grow.

“I don’t expect the world to change overnight – the development cycle is much longer for robotics than for purely software products, such as smartphone apps,” he said.

“We’ll see a gradual introduction of robotics into our daily life but over a vast range of applications.”

Robotae will be exhibiting a number of its projects at the Engineering Design Show, which is being held at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry, on October 19 and 20.